They Don’t Call it Hogtown for Nothing

The Toronto Star reports this week that residents of the King and Bathurst area are gagging on the smell from a Quality Meat Packers abattoir nearby. Heat + humidity + hog killing does not, one imagines, add up to a very pleasant bouquet.

Since the company has been in business for eight decades — part of the legacy that earned us the “Hogtown” nickname — Quality is grandfathered in and the only thing to do is buy nose plugs.

Many residents think that the neighbourhood, and the downtown core at large, has evolved past its industrial legacy and that the pigs need to get the pork out. Bet there’s one debate you didn’t have to consider when you bought your house.

At high temperatures, molecules are more prone to “fly around the atmosphere and enter our noses” according to the Star and Leslie Vosshall, a “scientist of smell” at the Rockefeller University in New York quoted in the article.

“You notice this when you’re cooking,” Vosshall said to the Star. “You buy some chicken soup and it’s frozen and you have to do a lot of huffing to get any scent … Then you dump it into the pan and you begin heating it up, and the heating of the chicken soup will release a cloud of chicken smell that fills your house.”

The Wellington Avenue pigbarn houses about 6,000 of the little oinkers, who arrive daily. Owner Erin Dowse of the Old York Bar & Grill in the neighbourhood told the paper she’s gotten used to the smell, and that her patio is full all summer. (It takes more than some gruesome aromas to keep Torontonians off a patio.) Dowse says the influx of condo dwellers seem to have forgotten to do their research, but condo guru Brad Lamb is quoted as saying we simply shouldn’t be smelling “that in what is really now a residential area.” He also bemoans the sticking-out snouts of the poor doomed creatures as they rumble past in their ventilated trailers.

Joe D’Abramo of the city’s planning department said there isn’t any legal recourse for opposition, because a 1946 planning protects existing land owners from zoning decisions. “Sometimes it’s not possible to wipe everything out and start anew,” he told the Star.

Until it closed a few months ago, the smell coming out of the Lever Brothers plant in the summer was no bed of roses either. While soap was what they made, what it smelled like was the world’s biggest nugget of Cat Chow. Its location at the foot of the DVP in what was once industrial land had also evolved over the years. Should we start lobbying for the closing of any business in the city limits that produces an unappetizing smell, just at a time when we really should be looking into a return to industry as an alternative to the out-sourcing and virtual businesses that don’t make anything tangible at all?

I also wonder lately where we got the idea that life was supposed to be sublime at all times, that getting used to an unpleasant smell in our neighbourhood meant that we should advocate for the loss of 700 or so jobs. When did we decide that we couldn’t be inconvenienced at any time, ever?

I don’t love the scent of an abattoir, but if I had bought a condo next to one, there would only be two words floating through my mind (even as I slapped my forehead): caveat emptor.

What do you think? Whose rights are being violated here (besides the pigs’)?

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The Star reports that 60% of Torontonians would object to a proposed Walmart near Kensington Market. Hallelujah! Forum Research says the negative responses came not just from area residents, either, but from across North York, Toronto, East York, Etobicoke and Scarborough. Nice to see that it’s not NIMBYism at work, but rather seems to be a genuine concern with keeping downtown free of the plague of big box stores that are the bane of our suburban landscapes. Not surprisingly, the most opposition came from people with incomes between $80,000 and $100,000 annually.

The same survey (which polled 1,239 random adults by phone) also revealed that two-thirds of respondents thought that local government should focus on “building a better city” versus keeping taxes low, and half thought there was too much waste at city hall. Torontonians feel that the city’s garbage should be incinerated or gasified versus trucked to a landfill by a margin of more than a third, while 60% of respondents thought the disruption of traffic on account of Toronto’s plethora of marathons was worth the inconvenience.

It’s heartening to see our residents are thinking beyond their own backyards. Can anti-NIMBYism be an idea whose time has come?